Comments on 2012 MVP Awards

I knew Soriano was having a pretty productive year, however, I didn’t think he was worthy of an MVP vote – whether it’s 6th, 9th, or 10th. But good for him.

Anyhow, I decided to go ahead and look at the last 9 years for Soriano and ARod. Interestingly enough, both played in the same number of games (Soriano 140, ARod 139), both averaged around the same number of hits (Soriano 148, ARod 152), both averaged around the same number of homeruns/year (Soriano 31, ARod 34), and Soriano struck-out on average 12 more times/year than ARod (128, 116).

That’s pretty much where the similarities end, as one would expect. Here’s Soriano Avg/OBP/Slg/Ops/Ops+ line:
.268/.323/.504/.827/113

ARod’s:
.291/.385/.533/.917/140

ARod has one championship, and was resigned to that ridonkulous contract by Hal during the 2007 off-season. Soriano signed a slightly less offensive contract in 2006, but still absurd. ARod and Soriano will forever be linked because of the trade that brought ARod here.

When looking at these numbers, did we get THAT much more based on the price-tag? My vote: because ARod pretty much delivered clutch-hit after clutch-hit during the 2009 playoffs, then it was worth it, but if the Yanks hadn’t won a championship then this trade would look really dumb right now.

And Steve, I already know your opinion about ARod and the ’09 playoffs. To me that’s irrelevant because he was never accused of anything and never found guilty, so I’d rather not speculate and act McCarthy-like.